Review: Puzzle Quest comes to the iPhone and we have the review.

Puzzle Quest is nothing new by any means. The game took a simple puzzle game aesthetic of matching rows of the same block, added additional role playing elements such as classes, spells, equipment, and spawned a franchise that captured mainstream attention... years ago.

With this in mind, I won't bore you with the minor details and skip to why or why not you should spend the high price (for iPhone games at least) on a game that's actually not a full game, its split into chapters and purchasing one chapter nets you the next chapter free plus there's promise of that other chapters won't cost as much as the introductory one does.

And the answer for why its worth your money is: because it's Puzzle Quest.

It's the same Puzzle Quest the mainstream fell in love with on their DSs, PSPs, PCs, PS3s, and Xbox 360s. The only difference is that the game now fits into your pocket.

Level grinding via match 3 puzzle battles remains completely addicting, taking quests from NPCs that talk too much is still a minor annoyance, and the colorful artwork that made Puzzle Quest easy to look at for hours is still intact. It's perhaps the only game on the App Store currently that can take on the current puzzle game champion Aurora Feint.

Even though Puzzle Quest was sliced into three chapters, there is still enough meat here to justify the $9.99 your going to want to spend. There's easily 20 hours of gameplay here which should keep bored office workers happy long enough till the next chapter releases. There's also no fear of losing progress since characters will be carried over from chapter to chapter.

Which just leaves Puzzle Quest's problems. Despite a recent patch, the text in the game is still kinda hard to read, not impossible, but still something you might want to just skim for the important parts rather than soak every word in.

There's also the issue of crashing. It's not a constant by any means and after an entire weekend and some change of playing, the game only crashed twice. In addition, there's a slight framerate problem when you chain huge combos that doesn't effect gameplay so much as make you roll your eyes when it happens.

Bottom Line

I guess the phrase ?Puzzle Quest in your pocket? would sum up what you need to know about this game. It has a high price point for sure, but its justified by how much content is actually packed into the 80MB and of course the value of the content. It has some problems that can easily be fixed by another patch but overall don't kill the gameplay.